Crime Spells Part 5

"Thag you, Harry," he says. "I G.o.d to deliver this. I'll see you lader."

He walks out of the men's room, through the tavern, and out the front door, and I go back to the apartment, where Benny and Gently Gently have spent the night. (Well, Benny spent the whole night; Gently Gently made four more trips out for nine-thousand-calorie snacks.) "Is it accomplished?" asks Benny.

"Let's give it an hour," I say.

Benny spends the time staring at his watch and counting down minute by minute. Finally it is time.

"He's got to have delivered it by now," I say, "and whoever he's delivered it to hasn't had time to get to a bank. So let's make sure he thinks twice before trying to rob Harry the Book again." I pause for dramatic effect, and then say: "Abracadabra."

"That's it?" asks Benny. "Nothing's happened."

"It's not going to happen here," I say. "Turn on the news in another hour and we'll see if it worked."

Benny counts down from sixty to zero once more, and then turns on the television. The news is on all the channels: The estate of Mafia don Boom-Boom Machiavelli has spontaneously caught fire and burned to the ground.

"And that's that!" says Benny, rubbing his hands together gleefully.

"Not quite," I say.

"Oh?"

" Milton never used a bank or a safe in his life, which means his share caught fire in his pocket. Find out what hospital he's in and send him some flowers."

"Any note with it?" asks Benny.

"Yeah," I say. "Tell him that if G.o.d had meant pianos to fly, He'd have given them wings."

Gently Gently looks surprised. "You mean He didn't?"

If Vanity Doesn't Kill Me.

by Michael A. Stackpole.

For a guy who squeezed into a rubber nun's habit before hanging himself in a dingy motel room closet, Robert Anderson didn't look so bad. Sure, his face was still livid, especially that purple ring right above the noose, and his neck had stretched a bit, but with his eyes closed you couldn't see the burst blood vessels. He looked peaceful.

I glanced back over my shoulder at Cate Chase, the Medical Examiner. "I've seen worse. Is that a good thing?"

"Let's not start comparing instances." With her red hair, blue eyes, and cream complexion, Cate should have been a heartbreaker. She would have been, save she was built like a legbreaker. One glance convinced most men that she could hurt them badly, and not in a good way. She jerked a thumb at the room's vanity table. "What do you think?"

I shrugged. Dragging it along had tipped over a can of soda, and a half-eaten sandwich had soaked most of it up. The Twinkie had resisted the soda, being stale enough you could have pounded nails with it. "Looks like he unscrewed it from the wall, s.h.i.+fted it so he could watch himself. Autoerotic asphyxiation?"

She nodded. "Suffocating as you climax is supposed to take the o.r.g.a.s.m off the charts. You pa.s.s out, you can strangle to death."

"Not my idea of fun."

"There go my plans for the rest of our afternoon." She flicked a finger at Anderson. "Take another look."

I caught her emphasis and breathed in. I closed my eyes for a second, then reopened them. I peered at him through magick. He was a silhouette, all black and drippy. Corpses tend to look like that. I'd seen it before.

"Something special I'm supposed to see?" I faced her as I asked the question, and magick rendered her in shades of red gold, much like her hair. It put color into everything, save for that Twinkie. It was neither alive nor dead.

Cate shook her head. "Something, I hoped. Anything."

I waited for her to expand on her comment, but she never got a chance.

Detective Inspector Winston Prout charged into the room and thrust a finger into my chest. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing here, Molloy?"

"I invited him, Prout," Cate said.

I smiled. "Coffee date."

He glared at the both of us, about a heartbeat from arresting us for indecent urges. He was one of those skinny guys who'd look better as a corpse. He wouldn't have to keep his parts all puckered and pinched tight. He habitually dressed in white from head to toe, and he had exchanged his skimmer for a fedora after his recent promotion to Inspector.

"Civilians aren't allowed in a crime scene, Molloy."

"My prints, my DNA are on record. I haven't touched anything."

"If you don't have a connection to this case, get the h.e.l.l out of here."

I hesitated just a second too long.

He raised an eyebrow. "You connected?"

"Maybe." I shrugged. "A little."

"Spill it."

"Your vic?" I nodded toward the man in the closet. "He's married to my mother."

That little revelation had Prout's eyes bugging out the way Anderson 's must have at the end. I'd have enjoyed poking them back into his face, but he got control of himself pretty quickly. He was torn between wanting to arrest me right that second and fear that I'd already set a trap for him. He'd wanted a piece of me since before his stint in the Internal Affairs division. He saw it as a divine mission, and getting me tossed from the force for bribery hadn't been enough.

He punted the two of us, leaving a tech team to do the crime scene. Cate and I retreated through a hallway where painters were trying to cover years of grime in a jaunty yellow to a nearby coffee joint. We ordered in java-jerkese, then sat on the patio amid lunch-bunnies catching a post-Pilates, pre-spa jolt.

"You didn't know about Anderson, did you?"

Cate shook her head. "Should I say I'm sorry for your loss?"

"If it will make you feel better."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. He was a s.h.i.+t. He and my mother were very Christian, which meant they were usually anti-me."

Cate understood. Prejudice against those who are magically gifted isn't uncommon, especially with Fun-dies. It's that "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" thing. Having a talented child is as bad as having a gay kid was late last century. My mom had compounded things by being the society girl who ran off with a working man-my father-then getting pregnant and actually delivering the child. My having talent was the last straw. She ditched my father, the Church got the marriage annulled, and she made a proper society match with Anderson.

I blew on my coffee. "Why did you call me?"

Cate leaned forward, resting her forearms on the table. " Anderson 's the fifth Brahmin who's died like that in the last two months. Very embarra.s.sing circ.u.mstances. The deaths have been swept under the carpet."

She fished in her pocket, produced a PDA, and beamed case files into mine. I glanced at the names on each doc.u.ment. I knew them. I dimly recalled that they'd died, but I couldn't remember any details. I'd met three of them, liked one, but only because she didn't like my mother.

"How did Amanda Preakness die?"

"You won't want to look at the photos. She drowned. In her tub. In chocolate syrup."

"What?" She'd been slender enough to make Nancy Reagan look like a sumo wrestler. Tall and aristocratic, with a shock of white hair and a piercing stare, she could have dropped an enraged rhino with a glance. She always threw lavish parties but never ate more than a crumb. "Not possible."

"Not only did she drown in the syrup, but her belly was stuffed full of chocolate bars. Junk food everywhere at the scene, all washed down with cheap soda." Cate shook her head. "Nothing to suggest anything but an accidental death. Or suicide."

"Neither of which could be reported, so her society friends wouldn't sn.i.g.g.e.r at her pa.s.sing." I frowned. "No leads?"

"Plenty. Problem's no investigation. I pester Prout. He hears but doesn't listen."

"Which is odd since you suspect our killer is talented."

"Has to be. And strong."

Just being born with talent isn't enough. Talent needs a trigger, and not many folks find that trigger. Mine's whiskey-I discovered it when I was four by sucking drops from my old man's shot gla.s.s after he pa.s.sed out. The better the whiskey, the faster the power comes.

Once you find the trigger, you next have to learn your channel. For most folks it's the elements: earth, air, fire or water. A talented gardener with an earth channel is good; one who works with plants is better. Some channels are a bit more esoteric, like emotions. I even met a guy whose channel was death.

Not really a fun guy, that one.

If there was a killer, knowing his trigger and channel would be useful. I could guess on the channel being emotional or biological, but that didn't narrow things down much. More importantly, it really did nothing to figure out why the murders were taking place. Without a why, figuring out who was going to be tough.

I set the PDA down. "What's in this for me?"

Cate rocked back. "Stopping a murderer isn't enough?"

"Not like it's my hobby. I work mopping up puke in a strip club. I know where I stand in the world. I don't see this getting me ahead."

"Maybe it won't, Molloy, maybe it won't." Cate's eyes half lidded, and she gave me a pretty good Preakness-cla.s.s glance. "Maybe it'll stop you from sinking any lower."

"Is that possible?"

"You're not there yet." Her expression hardened. "If you were, I'd ask if you had an alibi for when Anderson died."

I guess being a murderer would be a step down. Not that I minded Anderson being dead. Given the right circ.u.mstances I might even have killed him. Or, at least, let him die. A shrink would have said it because he was a surrogate for my mother and that secretly I was wis.h.i.+ng her dead.

There wasn't any "secretly" about it. I knew I had to start with her, so I reluctantly left Cate. The part I was resisting was that seeing her would prove she was still alive.

I tried to look on the bright side.

Maybe she was sick, really, really sick.

And not just in the head this time.

The Anderson Estate up in Union Heights was hard to miss. Fortune 500 companies had smaller corporate headquarters. The fence surrounding it had just enough juice flowing through it to stun you; then the dogs would gnaw on you for a good long time.

The gate was already open, and a squad car was parked there. The officers waved me past, but it wasn't any blue-brotherhood thing. I'd never known them when I was on the force. I'd just gotten their a.s.ses out of trouble at the strip club.

Took me two minutes to reach the front door. Would have been longer, but I cut straight across the lawn. Wilkerson, the chief of staff-which is how you now p.r.o.nounce the word "butler"-opened the door before I'd hit the top step. "It will do no good to say the lady of the house does not wish to see you, correct?"

He didn't even wait for me to reply before he stepped aside. He looked me up and down once. He channeled my mother's mortification, then led the way up the grand staircase to my mother's dressing room. He hesitated for a moment and memorized the location of every item in the room, then reluctantly departed, confident the looting would begin once the door clicked shut.

The room was my mother: elegant, well appointed, tasteful, and traditional. I'm sure it was all "revival" something, but I couldn't tell what. Even though she'd made an attempt to "civilize" me in my teens, very little had stuck. I did know that if it looked old, it was very old, including some Byzantine icons in the corner with a candle glowing in front of them. In a world where even people were disposable, antiques held a certain charm.

Not so my mother.

She swept into the room wearing a dark blue dressing gown-clearly Anderson 's-and dabbed at her eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief. Her eyes were puffy and rimmed with red. For a moment I believed she might have been crying for him, but grief I could have felt radiating out from her.

My mother doesn't radiate emotions. She sucks them in. Like a black hole. I think that's why her daughter is a nun in Nepal, I'm a waste of flesh, and my half-brother is the Prince of Darkness.

"There's nothing in his will for you, Patrick."

"Good to see you, too, Mother. I hope he spent it all on himself."

Her blue eyes tightened. "It's in a trust, all of it, save for a few charitable donations."

I chuckled. "That explains the tears. Hurts to still be on an allowance."

"Yours is done, Patrick. I know he used to give you money." She fingered the diamond-encrusted crucifix at her throat. "He was too softhearted."

"He gave me money once, and it wasn't Christian charity." I opened my hands. "I came from the crime scene..."

Her eyes widened. "You beast! If you breathe a word!" Tears flowed fast. "How much do you want?"

"I don't want anything." I shook my head. "Five people have died in the last two months, your husband included. All of them nasty. Sean Hogan, Amanda Preakness, Percival Kendall Ford, and Dorothy Kent."

"Dottie? They said it was a botox allergy."

"It doesn't matter what they said, Mother."

She blinked and quickly made the sign of the cross. "Are you confessing to me, Patrick? Have you done this? Have you come for me?"

"Stop!" I balled my fists and began to mutter. Like most folks, she bought into the Vatican version of the talented. She figured I was going sacrifice her to my Satanic Master, or at least turn her into a toad.

Tempting, so tempting.

She paled and then sat hard on a daybed. "I'll do anything you ask, Patrick. You don't want to hurt me, your mother."

I snorted. If she had enough presence of mind to invoke the maternal bond, she wasn't really shocked, just scheming. "How was Anderson hooked up with the others?"